In 1967’s The Graduate there are two moments when you can see Benjamin Braddock, played by a young Dustin Hoffman, making the decisions that serve to turn him from a goofy, awkward, suburban weirdo of a boy, into a still goofy, still awkward, but heroic and magnificent weirdo of a man.
One of them comes when he is alone in his room, just after he has crushed the hearts of Elaine Robinson and her mother with the line ‘that older woman I was telling you about… that wasn’t just some woman’, and decides he is going to marry Elaine. The other comes a few minutes later, in a Brooklyn boarding house, when he makes his violent and mangled confession of undying love to her and asks for her hand in marriage, ultimately paving the way for one of the most brilliantly messy resolutions in movie history. Significantly, both of those moments are the only points (aside from that one scene with the scuba suit) where Braddock wears anything other than an itchy sports jacket and tie ensemble. Instead he wears nothing more complicated than a plain, white, crew-necked cotton t-shirt. By the end of The Graduate, Braddock is cemented as a hero for weirdos and visionaries everywhere, a man with the courage to follow his instincts no matter what. It is no coincidence that these are also the moments where he has shed the sartorial cocoon of suburbia, and stripped back to the basics. That white t-shirt represents a lot.
But then in TV and movies it always does – pinpoint any time in pop-culture history, pick more or less any rebel, outsider, or alienated hero, and you will find that the one item they all have in common is the plain white T: James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, Matt Dillon in Drug Store Cowboy, or even Robert Pattinson in Twilight. It’s the only thing they all, at some point, wear. That could be down to the fact that since the 1900s, the white t-shirt has been one of the most ubiquitous items of clothing on the planet. It could, however, come down to the fact that it represents the boldest statement a man can make with his clothes. You could get bogged down for hours in the semiotics of a plain white t-shirt, working out what it represents and signifies, but its genius as a garment is that it represents nothing. It is the one thing that a man can wear to say that what he is wearing doesn’t mater, that him and his attitude are enough. It is the most confident statement that any man can make.